1999. Third term of drama school. I am on my final warning before an ignoble eviction from the premises. And not with the renegade flair in which Russell Brand and Tom Hardy departed. Nope, it’s my sheer lack of frivolity. I mulch through the ballet room dejectedly, and bang my head off the bar. Our principal pops his head in —a terrifying figure, with the eyes of a Tiger Shark and a tongue full of godlike rhetoric— and with typically baffling benevolence, says:

‘Darling, it’s called a play.’

Indeed it is. It’s worth remembering that, especially on the Off-West-End where we all work for nothing and the audiences expect West End values without the cliché.

And London theatre is very much like a playground. As such, there’s a gaping gulf between the flash West End and the frumpy Independents. The former have their designer trainers (sets), pocket money (wages), giggling admirers (audiences) and their behind-the-bike-sheds spin-the-bottle extravaganzas (opening night parties). The Off-West-End competes against this with the inspiration of necessity, low-fi edginess and end-of-run parties where glamour means a slice of pizza and a spanner to dismantle the stage.

The benefit of being the playground underdogs, of course, is inclusiveness. The West End hang out together off Leicester Square like juves on a garage forecourt, but they don’t really like each other. I mean, come on. When the Playhouse was ailing you didn’t see the Drury Lane bailing them out with the acumen of The Producers. At the very least the Fortune could have stopped hogging The Woman In Black and passed it around for a bit. The Off-West-End, on the other hand, band together because they have to. Sort of like The Goonies. But without the annoying accents.

This camaraderie suffers, perhaps, from the discrepancies of geography. Where exactly is the Off-West-End? From Hampton Wick to Highbury and Islington, from the Young Vic to the Hen & Chickens, so sweeps the ruddy realm of underdog theatre. There’s no snobbery here: unlike the snoots of Broadway, we have no Off-Off-West-End. And so we shouldn’t.

With the original ‘Theatre’ —Shakespeare’s first playground— being unearthed and resurrected in Shoreditch, and cinemas, boardrooms, amphitheatres and rooftops being reinvented as places of performance, I’m kick-starting a campaign to discover the best of brand spanking new venues in the Off-West-End. And I’m inviting you to help me. We’re looking for the next wunderkind to join the theatre playground: a venue that’s malleable and accessible and phantasmagorical enough to embody everything that’s best about the Off-West-End. Those of you acquainted with this blog may be concerned that my frenetic nature and infatuation with insurmountable challenge may take me too far, and that perhaps I’ll end up championing a theatre on a floating island in the middle of the Thames. And you’d be right. That’s just the kind of thinking we need. In fact we could kick off with a production of The Admirable Crichton.

See, we’re working well together already. On you go.

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‘Tell you what mate, I got a brilliant idea for a sitcom, you should get it made…’

Most of us are familiar with the long, uncomfortable taxi ride, but there’s many more varieties than the casually racist, conspicuously homophobic and drop-me-off-here-I’ll-walk-the-rest banter. Actors tend to have gravitational pull on those colourful, spittle-jowled personalities who faithfully entrust their life stories. Or, in the case of the cabbie above, to realise their innovative idea for a sitcom about a taxi service. And no amount of pointing out that it’s been done twice before will placate them. No, they will not rest until you have pulled out a Moleskine notebook, adjusted your spectacles, and laid out a tape recorder like a sacrificial offering to the Nordic gods of elaboration.’

And yet, without the people willing to snitch on themselves, to animate the skeletons of their closets and choreograph them into award-winning off-west end musicals, we would be nowhere. Actors would never develop character. Writers would just write about writing, which is almost as dull as a painting of paint or a song about singing (although I do recall that one ‘in the rain’ did quite well).’

One of the chief benefits of extending the whole hilarious struggling actor routine is that you can, after several years of inextinguishable enthusiasm, devolve into cliché. This is a tender rite of passage. Essentially it means that by the time you’ve racked up twenty plays and a couple of tellies, you can officially begin drinking in the weekdays before midday. I call it The Esteemed Order Of Withnail (the ‘order’ generally being three pints of Guiness and a lager-top for the fellow with an afternoon casting). ‘

And it was post-audition of a honeyed afternoon that a few fellow unemployees and myself sank a game of pool, meeting an intriguing autosnitch who took my attention for a rumba with the following facts:’

Spitalfields Market used to employ children as rat-hunters. From the age of nine he was picked up at 4am, air-rifle in hand, enjoying free toast and a hallowed quid per rat.’

Bats can be completely disorientated by throwing sand at them. Once the little creatures crash-landed, he and his friends painted upon them swastikas and spitfire logos. Soon recovered, they took to the air, and hey presto: a miniature Battle of Britain.’

c)He has always regarded cheese as a fruit.’

I’m dubious about this last fact, if only because I’ve never seen a Mozzarella Smoothie. And yet…what brilliantly, colossally tall tales.’

So here’s to the gabblers, the yarners, the factual darners; the folk that bore, disgust and inspire our ears off. Long may they waffle.’ –>

What’s that? What’s really getting my goat this week? What’s not only ‘getting’ my goat, but getting it, skinning it, and offering it up in an over-priced bap? Well, I’ll tell you, thanks for asking:

People who say they’ll try anything once. ‘I’ll try anything once!’ they arf, normally on some ankle-brow reality TV show with a gormless thumbs-up prescriptive of meat-headedness. Really. Really will you? Would you, erm, I don’t know, try bungee-jumping off a motorway bridge into a procession of open-top trucks transporting porcupines? How about trying to play a vigorous concerto in petroleum refinery with a fiddle made of flint and tinder? Hm. Whilst you’re at it, try eating your own fist. Just once, mind.

Call me a party-pooper, but, no, there are some things that you shouldn’t try trying, not even once.

But then there is acting, and a metropolis of grey areas. We all say we’ll never do the dog-food commercials. Until the agent whispers the unholy sum of five figures, and bam, there you are in a poodle-suit. I was stupid/stubborn (stubbid?) enough to stick to my guns on two occasions: turning down Family Affairs (‘Ken Branagh,’ I loftily opined ‘never had to appear in that sort of dross, and neither shall I’ — twit) and, secondly, letting my agents turn down the RSC — because they didn’t want me ‘out of the picture’. I spent that year very much in the picture, if the picture in question was of me sitting by a silent phone, forlornly cradling my copy of Coriolanus.

Then there is understudying.

Understudying was the original induction for young actors plying their trade. With the rocketing success of the British film industry, however, our bright young things began getting snapped up for fantasy trilogies long before they’d learnt the term ‘play as cast’ — and a sense of shame began to accompany any lengthy spell as an understudy. The recent Hamlet cast-rejig showed that even the starriest of leading men can make way for his underexposed counterpart, should the appropriate discs slip. But no actor would argue that months of isolation in the dressing-room was good for the esteem. The understudy ends up less than understudied. They become invisible. And yet…

Given the opportunity, I’d try it. Once. Arf.

Understudying is practically unheard of in the fringe, and as such, please take this as legal notification of my patenting www.dial-an-understudy.com, for your every laryngitis/diarrhoea/stage-fright-induced emergency — a crack team of versatile actors that not only can hit the giddy highs and stumpy lows of a multitude of characters, but who can also learn an entire part in one morning. Or your money back.

Of course, the reason that smaller theatres don’t have understudies is because they don’t have the money in the first place. Which defies the point of setting up a business to make money from them. Hm. Perhaps we can operate under a charitable status scheme.

Ah. There’s nothing like an actor for a wacky, hair-brained scheme.

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